Sound Effect: The Poetics of Spoken Language in Tamil New Poetry

abstract: This article demonstrates how the colonial-era depreciation of poetry and the linguistic nationalism it launched made poetry unavailable as a medium for making Tamil literature modern during the interwar period. Temporarily, this genre could not advance Tamil modernism. Tamil writers' elevation of prose opened a space for reconsidering poetry, while debates about music and language supplied the terminology for this reconsideration—leading to the recasting of poetry as suitable for postcolonial expression. A modernist poetics of sound emerged from the intersection of prose discourses about individual alienation with music debates' framing of alienation as the separation of Tamil speakers from their language.